Read the Bible with Me! Day 1

Welcome to the Pauline Family's "Year of the Bible"! I'll be reading the Bible clear through this year, and I invite you to read along with me. 

It's always a good idea to pray before reading the Scripture, to open our mind and heart to the same Holy Spirit who inspired the writing of the Bible. This prayer, which will be our consistent prayer throughout the first five books of the Bible (called Torah by the Jews, and Pentateuch by many scholars), is based on a prayer by Blessed James Alberione. Let us pray:

I praise you, my God, with all people.
May they thank and adore you!
You have written your greatness in creation,
your Law in consciences,
your eternal promises in the Bible.
You are eternally faithful and always lovable!
As I read Sacred Scripture today, open my mind to hear your voice and understand your loving message.
Amen.

Today being Sunday, we start with two Psalms. Psalm 1 is especially fitting for beginning a project that will bring us into daily contact with the Word of God:

Blessed is the man who does not walkin the counsel of the wicked,Nor stand in the way of sinners,nor sit in company with scoffers.
Rather, the law of the LORD is his joy;and on his law he meditates day and night.
He is like a treeplanted near streams of water,that yields its fruit in season;Its leaves never wither;whatever he does prospers.
But not so are the wicked, not so!They are like chaff driven by the wind.
Therefore the wicked will not arise at the judgment,nor will sinners in the assembly of the just.
Because the LORD knows the way of the just,but the way of the wicked leads to ruin.

Today's three chapters are Genesis 1-3 (Genesis 1 starts here)  and then (because today is Sunday) Psalm 2. It is next to impossible to express how rich these ancient passages are in terms of the depth of revelation they contain. There is an ancient rabbinic tradition of interpretation, and building on that in the light of Jesus' coming, another two thousand years of Christian tradition. It was not by accident that the Gospel of John opens with the very same words: "In the beginning..."

I have personally been particularly blessed by Pope John Paul II's reflections on these chapters as found in the first section of his Theology of the Body. 

If you are looking for a solid but approachable companion to the Bible, I can wholeheartedly recommend A Catholic Introduction to the Bible: The Old Testament by Brant Pitre and John Bergsma. Although the authors are top-level Scripture scholars, they write for "real" readers. Notes include recent findings from archaeology and ancient manuscripts.

TOB Tuesday: a Deepened Sense of God

Dr David Schindler, one of the professors at the John Paul II Institute for Studies of Marriage and the Family (think "Theology of the Body graduate school"), comments that what Theology of the Body offers us today is a renewed, and deeper, sense of God: a real "Theo-logy."


On a related note (if you think about it!), today is the 35th anniversary of my first vows!

TOB Tuesday: John Paul II's "different" concept of human love

Getting into controversial terrain here by suggesting that a Pope offered a "different" vision than his forebears. What does Matthew Kuhner mean? And what is so "different" about John Paul's understanding of human love? What was that something "new" he offered the world in his Theology of the Body?

Answering "the" question of our times

So many of our friends, neighbors and relatives, especially the young adults, are unsettled by what the Church teaches in the ares and marriage and the human body; this confusion leads them away from the life of the sacraments and into a life and mindset that is more and more "conformed to this world." 

What if there were a way to change the direction of this movement away from Jesus and his Church, and help young adults to learn and appreciate the amazing and life-giving teachings that they can only find in the Catholic Church?

One of the great gifts Blessed John Paul II left the Church was his "theology of the body," a biblical view of human nature and relationships that is more needed than ever in our own very confused age. 

Now I am excited to share with you a project that I have been working on. Hopefully you will be able to join us, too--or at least let others know about it, starting with this trailer (prepared for us by a college student volunteer: Thanks, Istle!) Please share it far and wide!



For registration links (and lots more details) see our bookstore blog.

TOB Tuesday: Scripture and TOB

A few years ago I had a wonderful conversation with Father William Kurz, SJ  of Marquette University. He had just finished a monograph on the Scriptural Foundations of Theology of the Body, and today I found it online. (Lucky me, he had sent me an advance copy shortly after our conversation, so I have been able to draw on his insights for quite some time!) Download it now [with a right click and "save link as...]

Father Kurz is a Scripture scholar, and offers a pretty accessible summary of Pope John Paul's insights. Where some Bible experts have looked at Theology of the Body and shrugged at its approach to Scripture, Kurz (who can do historical criticism with the best of them--indeed, he teaches it) recognizes that the Pope was doing something that didn't fit in the academic categories. Clearly, John Paul was not offering an exegesis, or an analysis of the various manuscript traditions, or a cultural-anthropological study. Instead, Kurz says, the Theology of the Body fits into the best of the biblical traditions: it is a "wisdom" reading of the Scriptures, such as you find in books like Sirach and Ecclesiastes. This kind of reading takes the divine message as a whole, rather than piece by piece, and sees the unity of God's word as it offers a message for our own times that would not have been needed in former ages (just as we find it hard to read the Bible with the lens of someone from the 3rd or 9th or 13th centuries).

This paper can be helpful especially for biblically-grounded readers to get an overall sense of what the Theology of the Body is, and how its teachings draw from Scripture, applying it to our own culture's concerns, questions and dilemmas.